16-06-2025
MSO: Forbidden Love
The Romanian-born pianist Alexandra Dariescu brings the teenage Clara Schumann's piano concerto to life in a concert that celebrates some of opera's greatest lovers.
Against her patriarchal father's wishes, the brilliant and prodigious pianist Clara Wieck fell in love with the composer Robert Schumann when she was still a teenager and had just composed the piano concerto featured in this unique concert. Her older paramour waxed poetically after the work's 1835 premiere: 'Here white yearning roses and pearly lily calyxes inclined their heads; there orange blossoms and myrtle nodded, while alders and weeping willows spread out their shadows.' Accepting his hand in marriage the following year meant Clara, while continuing to tour as a concert soloist, would have precious little time to write music in between raising eight children (with all but one reaching maturity) and enduring the stormy seas that was her husband's ever-declining metal health. 'I once believed that I possessed creative talent', Clara wrote despairingly, 'but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?'
Having established a titular award for an outstanding performance of a work by a female composer at the 2024 Leeds International Piano Competition, Alexandra Dariescu states 'The classical music world has made significant strides in recent years to address the gender balance, but there is still much work to be done.' Hence she delights in giving what is the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's premiere performance of Schumann's lyrical and suitably brooding Romantic-era concerto.
This concert's guest conductor Fabien Gabel, newly-appointed as the Music Director Designate of the Austrian Tonkünstler-Orchester, leads the musicians of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in music from the opera stage depicting similarly ill-fated yet fictional lovers such as Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and Claude Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande. Travelling to Cornwall to marry a king to whom she has been betrothed, Isolde falls for her handsome escort mid-journey, thanks to her servant's love potion, with deadly consequences. Pelléas too pays the ultimate price for his passion of Mélisande, murdered by the cuckolded Golaud. Musically, these works also share the distinction of making great strides both thematically and harmonically, establishing both these composers as revolutionary artists.
Recorded live in concert at Hamer Hall, Narrm/Melbourne, on October 5, 2024 by ABC Classic. Producer Duncan Yardley. Sound Engineer Russell Thomson.
Program
Deborah Cheetham Fraillon: Long time living hereClaude Debussy arr. Alain Altinoglu: Pelléas and Mélisande: SuiteClara Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op.7Florence Price: The Goblin and the MosquitoRichard Wagner: Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod
Richard Strauss: Die Frau ohne Schatten: Symphonic Fantasy
